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The Disciplined Disciple Compiler (DDC)

Disciple is a dialect of Haskell that uses strict evaluation as the default and supports destructive update of arbitrary data structures. Disciple includes region, effect and closure typing, and this extra information provides a handle on the operational behaviour of code that isn't available in other languages. Programs can be written in either a pure/functional or effectful/imperative style, and one of our goals is to provide both styles coherently in the same language. The two styles can be mixed safely, for example: when using laziness the type system guarantees that computations with visible side effects are not suspended. Many Haskell programs are also Disciple programs, or will run with minor changes. Our target applications are the ones that you always find yourself writing C programs for, because existing functional languages are too slow, use too much memory, or don't let you update the data that you need to.

State of Play

DDC is being rewritten to use a cleaned-up core language similar to what GHC now uses. The original (alpha) version of the compiler is still available in the source repository, but work on it has ceased.

The new DDC is currently at a stage where it will parse and type-check core programs, and compile recursive functions over lists. There is also an interpreter that we use to experiment with the language design. ​Example Code

This section summarises the main changes to the repository over the last month.

12/11/2012 Ben: repaired the C backend so it compiles the full language again. Make LLVM do tail call optimsiation on the generated code. Fix code generation for nested join points.